"Love Lies Bleeding," director Rose Glass' second feature film through A24 after the release of the feminist body horror epic "Saint Maud" in 2019, is a violently queer thriller that heartbreakingly, terrifyingly and hornily shows the many ways people can justify bad behavior because of love. It also provides a great example of how so much of life's easily doled out pandemonium could be better navigated or avoided altogether by being more like a cat via minding one's own business and adapting that perfect level of low-key that allows you to stay out of the mess while still getting your needs met.
Celebrated by critics and fans all over the world for its focus on the female gaze and steamy, although brief, sex scenes — which led one man at a screening in Detroit to land on the decision to make love to himself in the theater, resulting in his arrest — the film, once experienced firsthand beyond the hubbub, can be appreciated for so much more when you absorb its core message: women have a seemingly ingrained bad habit of being in chaos and calling it romance. And, more often than not, there's a cat somewhere in their home living an unbothered life, judging them through all of it and leading by example, although their lessons are usually ignored or otherwise disregarded.
Somewhat hard to describe due to the fact that the film's subject matter is fairly straightforward but plays out in a pulpy dream-like fashion, my attempt at a quick synopsis would look something like this: In 1989 New Mexico, Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a gym manager living in a dump apartment with her cat even though her degenerate father (Ed Harris) has mansion money. She unclogs poopy toilets with her bare hands, smokes cigarettes while listening to smoking cessation tapes, and lives to be what feels like an aggressively intentional small life until she meets an aspiring bodybuilder named Jackie (Katy O'Brian), who she falls in love with and asks to move in just days after she rolls into town. Even though, prior to this, Jackie sleeps with her brother-in-law J.J (Dave Franco) who regularly beats on Lou's sister, Beth (Jena Malone). Once Jackie – unbalanced from steroid use – starts just randomly murdering people, it's easy to look back at the days before she arrived, when it was just Lou and her cat, and how peaceful that must have been, in retrospect. But that's how it goes. And that's where this film goes. When the opportunity for sex and love presents itself, a person's own sensible comfort is often the first thing to get thrown out the window in a self-imposed bargain that never, actually needs to take place.
Again, I say, a cat would never.
When I was finally able to see "Love Lies Bleeding," days after its official release in mid-March following a festival run, the theater I sat in with my wife was filled with women of all queer varieties. Even my local nemesis was there. It felt complete.
For comfort and pettiness, I insisted on sitting behind my nemesis, rather than in front of them. This, unfortunately, placed us a row in front of the only straight-seeming man in the theater, who was seated in the very back, leaving us to conclude that he put himself there to freely masturbate with ease. I bird-eyed him through the whole movie. Shooting glances over the back of my seat and through the space between my seat and the next like a "you better not" peek-a-boo. I could sense others doing the same. We were on it.
Crunching on my go-to mix of greasy popcorn and Reese's Pieces as Kstew delivered lines like, " I want to stretch you out, see how far you can go," and Dave Franco's character was getting beat so badly that his jaw falls off, I kept noticing this cat in the background. Seeing it was like the visual equivalent of a whiff of lavender. Calming. A return to the normal. Others in the theater felt the same, and I know this for a fact because every so often, audible even through the booming soundtrack, I'd hear, "Awwww, the cat!" I think, in a way, many of the women were familiar with the emotional stress playing out on screen. And equally familiar with turning to a pet for comfort in similar situations.
In one scene, after Jackie shoots a character named Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov) — a townie lesbian obsessed with Lou who knows a bit too much — Lou gets to work cleaning up yet another mess caused by her new love just as she receives a knock on the door from the FBI. Stuffing the bloody remains of Daisy behind the couch, wrapped in a dirty rug, her cat nearly draws eyes to the blood that's beginning to seep out back there. After taking a few laps of the gore, it gets shooed away. Cats can, obviously, catch the drift more than people. There's a theme here.
In a video in which Rose Glass, Kristen Stewart and Katy O’Brian take turns reading Letterboxd Reviews for the film, Glass answers a question from the host regarding whether or not the cat in the movie was a good actor. She describes him as being “very food motivated” and “pretty obedient.” It's also revealed in this video that the cat is named Happy Meal in the film, but goes by Queso in real life. A foodie across the board. I'm into it.
By literally keeping its paws clean in the scene mentioned above, and in general by not adding to Lou's chaos, but soothing her during it, Happy Meal gets taken along at the end of the film when the lovers flee town. And while, yes, ditching a cat in a movie such as this one would have caused severe backlash from queer viewers, showing it being included in the getaway lends to my point here. Even when mixed in with characters that Stewart describes as being "morally defunct," it made it through in a way everyone could have learned from if they weren’t busy being losers. It kept its bowl full by avoiding all the mess around it, rather than running towards it. Aside from one fleeting curiosity. Which, in this instance, went against that famous saying because in "Love Lies Bleeding," curiosity kills almost everyone. But not the cat.
